francesco to allign the telescope can I usefinds out from the photographic plate the Plate solving process skipping the hand control procedure for alignement ?
No, do not skip aligning the mount if it does not come with an encoder or an accurate index mark at the home position. For those, you can just boot the mount up at the home position; the mount will know approximately where it is pointed to.
Plate Solving simply makes the need for perfect alignment accuracy less mandatory. But if the mount does not know where it is roughly pointed to, you risk the mount crashing your instrumentation into the pier when you execute a GoTo.
Unless the mount has an absolute encoder, you will need to do some alignment (whether it is an index mark in the mount, or using stars) to make sure the mount knows where it is roughly pointed to.
For safety (to prevent the mount from smashing the telescope into the pier), some mounts that don't have an index mark will not even open its USB port until you have done an alignment (or faked an alignment) -- i.e., ASIAIR may not even see the mount until you have first star-aligned the mount.
Chen
